Tag: RPGs

For large swathes of its history Japan was riven by internecine warfare, notably the periods of ‘feudal anarchy’ in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries [C.E.]. During those years the feudal lords (Daimyo) kept large standing armies which were constantly on the move throughout the country. It stands to reason that adventurers traveling in such a setting would have a relatively high chance of stumbling across one or more military units. This is a system for generating random encounters with such units.

The results will generate encounters with units varying in size from 11 individuals to 10,000 soldiers. Larger armies will include scouts, usually mounted, so DMs should take their existence into consideration when such an encounter is rolled….

— Random Encounters with Military Units in a Feudal Japanese Setting – Monsters and Manuals

…I don’t think that every class should get a raft of soldiers. The cleric should get less soldiers and more zealots and believers, but probably this was a bit creepy for the 1979 company [that published Dungeons & Dragons]…. I can cheerfully allow an “evil” cleric player character to gain eighty or so deranged, murderous thuggees ready to konk women unconscious and burn them alive in monthly festivals…. This was done in reality, once; no reason it shouldn’t be done in a player’s imagination.

— Food for Powder, Food for Worms – The Tao of D&D

I have never been a fan of the chromatic and metallic dragons of Dungeons & Dragons, even when ignoring the Alignment aspect. Great variety but otherwise lacking both depth and need, in my opinion. Red dragons are the closest to traditional European mythology: flying fire breathers. That seems sufficient—with one exception.

Regarding Alignment, something recently reminded me that in Basic D&D, with its single Law-Neutral-Chaos axis, white dragons are Neutral. This makes them usable as mounts by non-evil people. A new idea then occurred to me: white dragons, being cold-based, would be the ideal counter to red dragons. Anti-dragons.

Perhaps not even true dragons, but a species created and/or bred by mortals or gods to protect against the true ones.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragon’s Unearthed Arcana has an interesting magical item that I have never seen used: the Anything Sword.

As with several other things in Unearthed Arcana, this power comes with restrictions that make it almost not worth having. Ahem. 😀

This item has great potential for roleplay. So I am going to update it for use with D&D 5e. The biggest change I am making is removing the impermanence.

Anything Sword

Weapon (any sword), Legendary

This sword has a base type (e.g. short sword, longsword, et. al.) and a base +1 magical bonus. While drawn and held, you can use an action to have it transform into another magic sword. This is limited by the rarity of the new form:

• A Uncommon sword, any number of times per day
• A Rare sword, once per day (resetting at dawn)
• A Very Rare or Legendary sword, once per day (resetting at dawn)

It may stay in its new form indefinitely. If still in a Rare, Very Rare, or Legendary form at dawn, it remains in that form but it also expends the appropriate usage for the new day. Note that the sword type counts as part of its form. For example, it cannot change from a Vorpal longsword to a Vorpal greatsword as the latter would be a second Legendary form.

This can be taken further.

Anything Item

Wondrous Item, Legendary

This item has the base form of any Uncommon magical item. While held, you can use an action to have it transform into another magical item. This is limited by the rarity of the new form:

• A Uncommon item, any number of times per day
• A Rare item, once per day (resetting at dawn)
• A Very Rare or Legendary item, once per day (resetting at dawn)

It may stay in its new form indefinitely. If still in a Rare, Very Rare, or Legendary form at dawn, it remains in that form but it also expends the appropriate usage for the new day. Note that the item type/size counts as part of its form just like the Anything Sword.

So it can be all magical items but only one at a time, and only two big ones a day. Very powerful but I do not believe abusively so. Properly legendary.

FYI, the Elemental Blade of Fire is an Anything Item. Its base form is a Ring of Warmth. 😀

Seven-Part Pact is played using a framework….

At the start of each in-game month, every player decides how they plan to Spend Time that month. You have 4 tokens, one for each week (roughly). You can place these tokens on various people, places, and tasks. Place one on your Sanctum to spend time there, maybe change something about it. Place one on a Companion to spend time hanging out with them. Place one on the Grimoire to spend a week casting a spell slowly, patiently, carefully. Place one on your Domain to attend to your Wizardly duties (e.g. managing the wilds or advising the king or looking into the Dreaming or whatever it is you do). Etc. etc., many ways a Wizard can spend their time.

These represent the major stuff. The primary task you plan to focus on that week, the activity that’ll receive most of your attention and effort. It’s simply assumed that your character is still otherwise, y’know, living their normal day-to-day life and attending to mundane affairs….

Once everyone’s placed their tokens, we begin resolving the next month of activities. Going around the table, one at a time, each player retrieves one of their tokens and resolves that action….

You can resolve your…tokens in any order. Additionally, once per month, you may move one of your tokens before resolving it, at any time and for no cost. So you have a little bit of leeway to reschedule things on the fly. In this way, players plan ahead but can still be fairly flexible.

So far, this might sound less like an RPG and more like a board game. “Alright, this week my Wizard visits the island of Ishana to recruit a Bard to join the king’s Royal Court.” Done. Next player. Turns go by pretty fast, which I consider to be an advantage. But when does it feel like a roleplaying game?

Well, let me tell you about…Scenes.

In addition to your four Spend Time tokens, you also get one star-shaped token. Wherever you place your star token is where you get to have a Scene. A Scene is exactly what it sounds like. It’s the part of the game where we zoom in and start roleplaying as our characters moment by moment, speaking in dialogue, moving around rooms, casting spells, etc.

For most players, Scenes are the highlight of the game. But to me, it’s important that they merely punctuate the game. They’re an exception to the baseline mode of play. Instead of asking, “when is it time to zoom out and switch to a downtime timescale?” like in D&D, we ask “when is it time to zoom in and switch to a real-time timescale?” If we’re resolving an event as a proper Scene, then that means it’s important….

— Seven-Part Pact: Time – A Knight at the Opera

Author’s emphases both bold and italic.

I read that blogpost and immediately saw this game mechanic as a sufficiently light structure to use with our leisurely Xenoverse free-form roleplay. My friends and I do not play there much at all these days, but we do continually discuss what we want to play. These are broad strokes that easily fit into week- or month-long “game turns”—with the Scene being a spur to actually have regular in-character (chat) session, however short.

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• Blogroll July 2025 – VDonnut Valley

Well, spell names. I have never been able to create original spells for Dungeons & Dragons. I would read the Pages From The Mages series in Dragon Magazine issues in the 80’s, and just be intimidated by the concept.

In forty years, I have compiled but a short list of original spells:

• Fire Lance of the Ifrits (inspired by Doctor Strange comic)
• Occular Arc of Flame (inspired by Doctor Strange comic)
• Breath of the Dragon (predates Avatar: The Last Airbender)
• Andesoln’s Unerring Aim
• Eldrughei’s Shroud
• Wrath of the Largorahr
• Arhis’s Shield
• Great Mother’s Succor

Let’s consider a campaign setting dialed toward the pagan end of the spectrum. I will mostly be referencing Germanic paganism for this example because it is the historical culture I am most familiar with (note that this includes most of northern Europe from England to parts of Eastern Europe). Pagan gods are not all-powerful, nor are they omniscient or benevolent. They have different goals, biases, flaws and are more often worshipped out of reverence and respect and less out of love and devotion. They are given offerings in exchange for protection, favors, or just appeasement. On paper, this is pretty standard for your traditional D&D setting. But what we don’t really see is the implications and effects of this worldview on the setting. A pagan worldview is not one that is likely to lead to the traditions of medieval Europe nor the fantasy version of it with the holy knights, ornamented cathedrals, and battles between angels and demons.

Firstly, no place of worship was more important than the home, or more specifically, the hearth. Every proper home should have an altar around the hearth where offerings are prepared and daily prayer rituals are done. These alters can contain different shrines to different gods as well as shrines to non-deities such as ancestors and house spirits. That’s right, gods are not the only ones that receive prayers and offerings. It is just as important for a villager to give offerings to their local Kobold house spirit to keep them from causing trouble. On top of that, their ancestors are constantly watching, judging, and influencing from the afterlife. PCs and NPCs alike will want to pray to their ancestors for wisdom and seek to please them.

In general, the objects of worship: gods, spirits, and ancestors should be much more day-to-day than normally seen in fantasy settings. Farmers prayed to Thor to protect their cattle while housewives prayed to Freja to send cats to deal with mice. This doesn’t mean your adventurers can’t also summon the strength of a god to divine smite a giant, only that the gods are for everyone—not just high-level adventurers….

— Heathenizing Your RPG Campaign – Tabletop Tales

You want it? Quest for it. The moonlight sword, the favour of a cruel prince, the bio-nuclear heart of the Old Machines… These are how you will chisel your fate. So go get them….

Many games tell you to quest for the things you want. Blessings, magical swords, political favours—the big power-ups should come from going on a quest to get them.

I’ve always liked this concept. It helps to recreate the fiction that inspires these games. Protagonists should go on big damn adventures to get big damn rewards….

— How To Encourage ‘Quest for It’ – many_bubble

Imagine a setting where Charm Person sits within reach of every sociopath, malignant narcissist, fascist ideologue, sexual predator, human trafficker, abusive spouse and undifferentiated Just Kind of a Piece of Shit in the world. Think for a moment about how easy it would be to kill someone with Mage Hand and Shape Water.

That alone is more than sufficient to build a wizard-hunting campaign on, but wizards provide a great deal more practical benefit than just that. Why is there a dungeon that violates the laws of nature? Wizard did it. Why are their horrible monsters shambling through the hills feasting on travelers? Wizard did it. Why is there a nameless horror from beyond the stars with its sights set on our placid isle of ignorance? A wizard god-damn did it. Power corrupts because power is the ability to get what you want, and the more power you have the less anyone can get in between you and the thing you want….

— Exorcists and Wizard-Hunters: Alternate D&D Frameworks – Throne of Salt

Witnessing unspeakable supernatural horrors—always a professional risk for any protagonist in a ‘swords and sorcery’ adventure—can drive a mortal man or woman mad. Deliberately delving into ancient eldritch secrets for the purposes of unleashing unnatural forces or contacting demonic intelligences radically increases this risk. Insane sorcerers and men whose minds have been broken by ancient evils are standard staples in ‘swords and sorcery’ tales.

In order to simulate this aspect of the ‘swords and sorcery’ genre, these rules treat a character’s Wisdom score as a measurement of his/her sanity. A character with a Wisdom score of 18 has a firm grasp of the nature of reality, considerable self-discipline, and remarkable strength of will. In contrast, a character with a Wisdom score of 3 is barely lucid, easily confuses reality with fantasy, and is on the border of lapsing into madness. Characters with Wisdom scores of 2 or lower are utterly insane, and must be treated as non-player characters. (If this Wisdom loss is temporary, as explained below, the character is under the control of the Game Master until he/she regains his/her sanity.)

— Sanity – Akratic Wizardry

Fighters are strong and resistant and overcome mundane opponents in mundane means. As they grow in skill, they become more resistant and more lethal. However, as lethal as they can be, they still are mundane and can’t harm enchanted beings.

Enemies that can’t be harmed are awesome. As in, literally, terror inducing. Because we mundanes have no way of defending ourselves from them.

For those, fighters need a magic weapon.

Crucially, magic weapons, and especially magic swords, are the most common permanent magic item in [Original D&D]. Magic swords can only be used by fighters, and magic swords are pretty much the best magic weapon in the game: beyond giving the capacity to hit magic beings, they often give extra powers, like detection of invisible or magic, or even more, which are incredibly useful and not easy to come by (at least they require casters to spend precious spell slots).

Magic swords also have the habit of having intelligence and big personalities and taking sides in the Eternal Struggle between Law and Chaos. They can also possess their fighter, and shift from being an empowering tool for the fighter into a master for the fighter, their body and limbs mere tool for the Sword.

This might seem like a douche move. However, these swords are quite the equivalent of having a Faustian deal with the devil: great power comes at a great cost. Sure, they lead you to gems, and let you vanquish vampires, but what do the Swords ask in return?

And the Faustian deal usually generates buckets of solid, engaging drama at the table: for example the sword can force a noncompliant fighter into giving itself away to a fighter more worthy of the sword mission, and more compliant. If you want to keep the sword, you need to make the sword want to keep you.

So when you find an intelligent magic sword in a dragon trove ask yourself what kind of reckless sucidal action the sword must have forced on the fighter wielding it. The sword is in the dragon hoard because either it forced the fighter into fighting the dragon, or it let the fighter believe it could.

Magic swords use their fighters to leave a trail of death until they lead their own fighter to death. Then they lay unused in a hoard until their new owner is killed by a fighter. And the trail of death can start again. And again. And again. And again, until the timeless magic sword, and its unquenchable bloodthirst, is no more.

Good luck with that. Magic swords are much more resilient than the countless arms that bear them. Beside dragonfire and powerful magic, they have little to fear.

D&D Magic Swords are awesome as the creatures they can harm. As in, they inspire terror. Not only when facing them, but also when wielding them.

Because, mostly, what fighters do to fight the supernatural is wielding supernaturally angry steel that has a proven history of leading previous bearers to death.

— A few disordered thoughts on writing magic, starting from a detour on magic swords – Lost Pages

When you get a +1 sword, you don’t just get a sword that does more damage and hits more often. In D&D, this sword is inherently magical – the enhancement is the result of literal magic, as opposed to superior craftmanship. And that strikes me as really, really weird. Like, I was reading this series of posts over on a Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (super cool blog btw), and it seems like there was quite a range of possible qualities when making and finishing a sword. There are many fine considerations that go into making a predominantly metal weapon. What kind of iron and steel are using? How did you laminate the differing types of steel to make best use of their different material qualities? How do you finish the blade?

In a pre-capitalist society, there’s a lot of room for smiths of differing ability to be making dogshit swords or really really good ones, depending on region, price and demand, and I feel this isn’t represented very well in D&D rules. Like, okay, there are masterwork weapons in 3e but to be honest those rules kind of suck. Most of what makes a weapon special is magic.

What galls me in particular is the effect this has on internal logic in low-magic worlds. Like, okay, magic is rare, except every adventuring party has a wizard AND every every fighter past a certain level has a magically enhanced sword. And you could always just say "No magic swords" but in D&D this is the same thing as saying "No +1 swords." Which is pretty fucking boring for the sword-wielding members of your party.

So fuck it. The new enhancement scheme is +0 to +3 non-magical swords, to reflect differing abilities of smiths.

So a regular +0 sword is basically pure iron, or steel but made by someone who doesn’t know how to work steel well. It’s probably worse than a bronze sword, because pure iron is actually worse for weapons than bronze. Mercenaries and very rural or isolated nobility or the nobility of less metallurgically advanced societies usually carry these around. People who shouldn’t be able to afford swords, like adventurers or peasants, but somehow inexplicably have them will only have +1 swords. If you pull a sword out of a dungeon, or get it from salvage, it’s probably going to be a +0 sword because of long abandoned maintenance.

A +1 sword represents a smith who knows what the fuck they’re doing making an honest to god steel sword. It’s still rudimentary, not heavily layered, but its superior metallurgical quality still carries through. A knight from a kingdom’s core regions, well-off or high ranking professional soldier, or successful adventurer is going to have a +1 sword.

A +2 sword is getting into the real good stuff. This is the best work of the top tier of smiths currently alive. These are always commissioned, usually for richer nobles and kings. Actually, +1 swords are commissioned too, but commissioning a +2 sword is a Big Deal. A +2 sword is the best any adventurer should ever expect to get. +2 swords usually have names, and if they are wielded by someone famous, they will become famous as well.

A +3 sword barely even qualifies as a sword. Most people who own them think they’re too precious to risk actually using in a battle. It’s really more like an art object. If your players recover one of these, and decide not to use it, it should count as treasure for XP and stuff. Longstanding dynasties might have one of these, passed down from generation to generation, and they’ll sometimes wave it around before battle to motivate their troops. All of them have names. In my campaign, they’re all named after battles the Romans lost, like Carrhae, Cannae, Ebrittus, Caudine, or after their enemies, like Volsci, Aequi, Samnite, Alaric, and so on. The people who made them have names, and are legends unto themselves. A smith capable of making such a blade is trained once every half-millennium. Or maybe they’re like, a cyclops or something.

Note that this only applies to swords, in a sword-centric culture. Around here, the best a spear can be is +1, to account for better materials. This also helps keep swords distinct, as I tend to have a lot of different weapons In foreign places, maybe they’re really obsessed with axes or spears, and I guess all of this can apply to those weapons instead.

I also chose +3 because my campaign is supposed to have some pretty hard caps on to-hit bonuses. The highest to-hit bonus anyone can reasonably get with a +0 weapon is +4, for example. You can easily do the same thing with a traditional +5 scale.

"But wait!" You protest, "now none of my fighter characters have cool magic weapons! This blows!" Not so. I love magic swords. I just don’t see why they have to be +X or whatever. In fact, I think this kind of has the result of making magic weapons lame. To illustrate:

"You recover from the demi-liches a mighty sword, clearly of magical provenance."

"Holy shit, awesome! What does it do?"

"Um, it gives you +4 to hit and to damage."

Not exactly titillating, is it? But by tying sword enhancement to magic, I think this sort of play ends up being encouraged. The benefit of a magic sword should be the magic.

You could enchant a +1 sword to be magic, but most of these are being dug out of treasure piles of the gullets of scary monsters, so they should probably be +0. Or you could enchant a +0 sword to have +1 to-hit and damage, but that’s pretty boring and should require, like, a wizard that inexplicably has professional level knowledge of blacksmithing techniques. Sort of like this twitter thread I saw recently where a guy talked about how he (no joke) went to clown college and worked as a clown before pursuing a PhD. Incidentally, the clown stuff paid better than the PhD. But yeah, a wizard who can just make a +1 sword for you is going to require that specific melding of expertise in vastly different areas… if you want a +1 sword it’s way easier to just find a competent smith.

Mostly, magic swords should be weird or have cool but situational effects. Check out this (also a super cool blog especially if you like glog stuff) generator, except, you know, leave out the +1 stuff. I’m also cracking up imagining an intelligent sword that’s +0 and kind of insecure about it. Come on, that would be hilarious.

— +3 Swords – Profane Ape

— The Day the Universe Changed, Episode 4

Even in an RPG campaign world with magic, this is how most news would and should spread. This provides the perfect reason/excuse for bard (classed) PCs and NPCs to travel far and wide. This is their trade and purpose, after all.

…What if the best ratio of supply to demand [for materials of war] is not found in the big city, which has to stay peaceful and organized to attract trade and reap taxes, where the state is strong, and men, arms and magic are regulated…? What if instead the deals are to be found on the borders of civilization, where swords and mail are regularly looted from the slain? Stocks in the house of war have to be high, for any day now a warlord could strut by looking to garrison a castle or equip a company. And if magic items are bought and sold, the ones useful in a fight are more likely to command a good price in a place where the line between life and death is as clear as the sea’s horizon.

— The Price of a Hauberk in Gomorrah – Roles, Rules, and Rolls

More importantly, where are all the water mills? Water mills can be much larger than windmills, and are capable of doing more than just grinding wheat into flour.

Civilization’s first automation.

A quarterstaff is a polearm. It is a two-handed weapon. RPG wizards should not be proficient with it.

A wizard’s staff is, mechanically, a club.

In Tolkien the Elves were not human, and you see this reflected more in the early years of RPGs with Tolkien inspired elves in them. But in the 30+ years since they’ve been increasingly humanized (much like Vampires). Now they are just people with pointy ears (and Vampires are people who sparkle) and they’re written and played more or less like any other human character.

A lot of Elf characters in current media could lose the pointy ear prosthetics and just be a person. There’s really very little that makes them feel that different.

The otherworldly inhuman nature of Elves and other magical creatures is something you see throughout folklore. Here’s an old Irish Fairy Tale about a mermaid (not the half-fish kind, this is basically an Elf that lives in the water):

One spring morning, fisherman Patrick Gannon stood upon the seashore as the sun rose. “Lovely morning,” he sighed to himself. He puffed on his pipe, for nothing could bother Patrick this day.

Except one thing. He wished he could share his pleasure with a wife.

“Ah, a wife would be fine on such a morning,” he sighed again. Just then, he spied a rock upon the shore, upon which sat a beautiful young woman, combing her sea-green hair.

Patrick looked down at the sand. He knew this was a mermaid, a sea fairy. Beside the maiden sat a red cap with a feather—a magic cap, that is, the sort the mermaids wear to find their way home beneath the sea.

Patrick ambled down the shore toward the rock. “Hello,” he said, startling the mermaid. “Don’t be afraid,” he said. “I came only to say how pretty you look this morning.”

When she blushed and looked away for a moment, Patrick grabbed her cap.

“What do you want?” the mermaid asked.

“Mermaid,” Patrick said, “I want to marry you.” The mermaid accepted.

So Patrick put her cap into his pocket, for a mermaid will lose her memory without her feathered cap.

Now Patrick and the maiden returned to Patrick’s cottage. They had three children, and no one was happier than Patrick Gannon. However, one day he forgot to hang up his fishing nets.

Mrs. Gannon was cleaning that morning, and she spied the fishing nets that Patrick had not put away. When she lifted them, she found a hole in the wall, and in that hole she found her red cap.

The moment she found it, she put it on, and she remembered her father and mother and longed to see them. She walked out the door, turning once to blow a kiss to her sleeping children. She walked to the shore and dove into the sea.

So Patrick lost his beloved mermaid. Every day he walked to the shore, hoping that his wife would return, but she never did. Still, he never forgot her, for he knew that she had truly loved him.

The Elf in this story is not human and acts in an inhuman way—just like Tolkien’s elves. Real people don’t lose their memory when you take their magic hat, or walk away from their own children when they get their magic hat back. Humans have more compassion than that. They don’t lose the will to live when faced with tragedy either. What makes humans human is that they’re stronger than that.

Perhaps part of the problem is we’ve gotten so used to characters who are alien on the outside but human on the inside that we’ve forgotten about ones who are the other way around? Or who have an alien exterior as a visual symbol that they are not human and think and act in not human ways. When we take story elements and ideas from older media (like Tolkien) this is where we run into problems with confusion about how humans are depicted and how non-humans are intended to contrast with that.

Maybe we’ve had too many pointy eared humans in our media and not enough Elves?

— Elves, Half-Elves and Humanity – Strange Magic

Author’s emphases.

Thank the gods for the Internet Archive Wayback Machine, else I could not have linked to the source blogpost.

I, too, have spent countless hours on making D&D combat more to my liking. Like many I have come to appreciate simpler, more elegant mechanics.

While I have not yet found the right combination of attacks versus defense bonuses, I have “solved” the weapons list. Emphasizing the abstract design of D&D combat, I see only five weapon sizes—really just three:

During the Neo-Assyrian Empire (934-609 [B.C.E.]), allied cities that revolted had their gods confiscated and transferred to the capital, on the grounds that the rebels’ defeat proved that their gods had abandoned them.

— Al Nofi’s CIC #408 – Strategy Page

This is something that would be very interesting to portray in a roleplaying game campaign.

The term “Ranger” derives ultimately from a handful of mounted men paid by Virginia to “range” between the forts marking the edge of settlement in the late 1670s [C.E.].

— Al Nofi’s CIC #104 – Strategy Page